DARIO, Rubén
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viendo cómo caía el agua de una fuente.
la noche. Suspiraba la noche. Sollozaba
diluía la lágrima de un misterioso artista.
que mezclaba mi alma al chorro de la fuente.
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watching how a fountain’s water fell;
was crying. The night was sighing. The night
was diluted in the twilight’s soft amethyst.
mixing my soul with the fountain’s stream.
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Terremoto
Madrugada. En el silencio reposa la gran villa
donde de niño supe de cuentos y consejas,
o asistí a serenatas de amor junto a las rejas
de alguna novia bella, timorata y sencilla.
El cielo lleno de constelaciones brilla,
y su oriente disputan suaves luces bermejas;
de pronto, un terremoto mueve las casas viejas
y la gente en los patios y calles se arrodilla,
medio desnuda, y clama: “¡Santo Dios! ¡Santo fuerte!
¡Santo inmortal!”. La tierra tiembla a cada momento.
¡Algo de apocalíptico mano invisible vierte!...
La atmósfera es pesada como plomo. No hay viento.
Y se diría que ha pasado la muerte
ante la impasibilidad del firmamento.
Bagpipes of Spain
Bagpipes of Spain, ye that can sing
That which is sweetest to us in the Spring!
You first sing of gladness and then sing of pain
As deep and as bitter as the billowed main.
Sing. 'Tis the season! As glad as the rain
My verses shall trip ye a jig or a fling.
Ecclesiastes said it again and again,
All things have their season, O bagpipes of Spain!—
A season to plant, a season to reap:
A season to sew, a season to tear;
A season to laugh, a season to weep;
Seasons for to hope and for to despair;
A season to love, a season to mate;
A season of birth, a season of Fate…
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Un soplo milenario trae amagos de peste.
Se asesinan los hombres en el extremo Este.
Se han sabido presagios y prodigios se han visto
y parece inminente el retorno de Cristo.
que el soñador imperial, meditabundo,
sufre con las angustias del corazón del mundo.
en un pozo de sombra la humanidad se encierra
con los rudos molosos del odio y de la guerra.
para tender tu mano de la luz sobre las fieras
y hacer brillar al sol tus divinas banderas?
sobre tanta alma loca, triste o emperdernida
que, amante de tinieblas, tu dulce aurora olvida.
Vén con temblor de estrellas y horror de cataclismo,
vén a traer amor y paz sobre el abismo.
pase. Y suene el divino clarín extraordinario.
Mi corazón será brasa de tu incensario.
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The winds bear on their pinions the horror of Death's cry;
Assassinating one another, men rage and fall and die.
Portents are seen and marvels that fill the world with awe,
And Christ's return seems pressing, come to fulfill the Law.
The royal dreamer, musing, silent and sad apart,
Grieves with the heavy anguish that rends the world’s great heart.
Have cast man in the darkness of labyrinths intricate
To be the prey and carnage of hounds of war and hate.
And stretch Thy hands of radiance over these wolves of night,
And spread on high Thy banners and lave the world with light?
On souls that crazed with hunger, or sad, or maddened be,Who tread the paths of blindness forgetting the dawn and Thee.
Brow! With trembling stars around Thee and cataclysmal woe,
And bring Thy gifts of justice and peace and love below!
And angels sound the clarion of Judgment from on high.
My heart shall be an ember and in thy censer lie
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y más la piedra dura porque ésa ya no siente, pues no hay dolor más grande que el dolor de ser vivo
ni mayor pesadumbre que la vida consciente.
y el temor de haber sido y un futuro terror... ¡Y el espanto seguro de estar mañana muerto,
y sufrir por la vida y por la sombra y por
y la carne que tienta con sus frescos racimos, y la tumba que aguarda con sus fúnebres ramos y no saber adónde vamos,
ni de dónde venimos!...
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And more so the hard stone that is without feeling For there is no pain greater than that of living
And no greater sorrow than a life of knowing
And the fear of a past and future doom And tomorrow's certain death to be dreading
And to suffer for life and death's gloom
And the flesh with its tempting fruitful vines And the beckoning crypt with its funereal boughs With no knowledge to where we're bound
Nor from whence we've arrived
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Nocturnal...Why does the soul tremble in such a manner? I hear the pulsing of my blood, Within my cranium a calm storm happens. Insomnia! Unable to sleep, and nonetheless, dream. To be the auto-piece of spiritual dissection, the auto-Hamlet! Dilute my sadness in the wine of night in the marvelous crystal of the darkness... And I tell myself: at what hour will dawn arrive? A door has closed... A bystander has passed...
The clock has given three hours...Could it be her!...
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los que por el insomnio tenaz habéis oído el cerrar de una puerta, el resonar de un coche
lejano, un eco vago, un ligero ruido...
cuando surgen de su prisión los olvidados, en la hora de los muertos, en la hora del reposo,
¡sabréis leer estos versos de amargor impregnados!..
de lejanos recuerdos y desgracias funestas, y las tristes nostalgias de mi alma, ebria de flores, y el duelo de mi corazón, triste de fiestas.
y la pérdida del reino que estaba para mí, el pensar que un instante pude no haber nacido,
¡y el sueño que es mi vida desde que yo nací!
en que la noche envuelve la terrena ilusión, y siento como un eco del corazón del mundo que penetra y conmueve mi propio corazón |
you that have heard, in the long, sleepless hours, a closing door, the rumble of distant wheels, a vague echo, a wandering sound from somewhere:
when the forgotten ones issue from their prison-- in the hour of the dead, In the hour of repose--
will know how to read the bitterness in my verses.
my grief for remote memories and black misfortunes, the nostalgia of my flower-intoxicated soul
and the pain of a heart grown sorrowful with fêtes;
the loss of the kingdom that was awaiting me, the thought of the instant when I might not have been born
and the dream my life has been ever since I was!
in which the night develops earthly illusions, and I feel as if an echo of the world's heart
had penetrated and disturbed my own.
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Blazon
The snow-white Olympic swan,
with beak of rose-red agate,
preens his eucharistic wing,
which he opens to the sun like a fan.
His shining neck is curved
like the arm of a lyre,
like the handle of a Greek amphora,
like the prow of a ship.
He is the swan of divine origin
whose kiss mounted through fields
of silk to the rosy peaks
of Leda's sweet hills.
White king of Castalia's fount,
his triumph illumines the Danube;
Da Vinci was his baron in Italy;
Lohengrin is his blond prince.
His whiteness is akin to linen,
to the buds of white roses,
to the diamantine white
of the fleece of an Easter lamb.
He is the poet of perfect verses,
and his lyric cloak is of ermine;
he is the magic, the regal bird
who, dying, rhymes the soul in his song.
This winged aristocrat displays
white lilies on a blue field;
and Pompadour, gracious and lovely,
has stroked hs feathers.
He rows and rows on the lake
where dreams wait for the unhappy,
where a golden gondola waits
for the sweetheart of Louis of Bavaria.
Countess, give the swans your love,
for they are gods of an alluring land
and are made of perfume and ermine,
of white light, of silk, and of dreams.
A Shell
I found upon the shore a golden shell,
Massive, and with the daintiest pearls embossed;
Europa touched it with her hands divine
When on the heavenly bull the sea she crossed.
I lifted to my lips the sounding shell,
And woke the morning drum-beats of the sea;
I held it to mine ear, the azure mines
Of hidden treasure murmured low to me.
Thus comes to me the salt of those keen gales
The Argo felt within her swelling sails
When Jason's dream the stars of heaven loved well;
An unknown voice 'mid wave-sounds there I find,
A deep sea-swell and a mysterious wind.
(Shaped like a heart it is, that sounding shell).
Song of Autumn in the Springtime
Youth, treasure only gods may keep,
Fleeting from me forever now!
I cannot, when I wish to, weep,
And often cry I know not how…
My heart's celestial histories,
So countless were, could not be told.-
She was a tender child, in this
World of affliction manifold.
She seemed a dawn of pure delight;
She smiled as the flowers after rain;
Her tresses were like to the night
Fashioned of darknesses and pain.
I was timid and childlike shy.
I could not but have been this way:
She, to my love chaste as the sky,
Was Herodias and Salomé…
Youth, treasure only gods may keep,
Fleeting from me forever now!
I cannot, when I wish to, weep,
And often cry I know not how…
The other was more sensitive,
More quieting and loving-kind,
With greater will to love and live
Than I ever had hoped to find.
For with her grace of tenderness
A violence of love she had:
In a peplos of loveliness
Was hid a Maenad passion mad…
Youth, treasure only gods may keep,
Wilted in me forever now!
I cannot, when I wish to, weep,
And often cry I know not how…
Another fancied my lips were
A casket wrought to hold her love;
And wildly with the teeth of her
To gnaw my very heart she strove.
She willed all passionate excess;
She was a flame of love for me;
She made each ardorous caress
Synthesis of eternity.
She deemed our flesh a deathless thing,
And on desire an Eden reared,
Forgetting that the flowers of Spring
And of the flesh so soon are seared…
Youth, treasure only gods may keep,
Fleeting from me forever now!
I cannot, when I wish to, weep,
And often cry I know not how…
And the others! In many climes,
In so many lands, ever were
Merely the pretext for my rhymes,
Or heart-born fantasies of her.
I sought for the princess in vain,
She that awaited sorrowing.
But life is hard. Bitter with pain.
There is no princess now to sing!
And yet despite the season drear,
My thirst of love no slaking knows;
Gray-haired am I, yet still draw near
The roses of the garden-close….
Youth, treasure only gods may keep,
Fleeting from me forever now!
I cannot, when I wish to, weep,
And often cry I know not how…
Ah, but the golden Dawn is mine!
Portico
I am the singer who of late put by
The verse azulean and the chant profane,
Across whose nights a rossignol would cry
And prove himself a lark at morn again.
Lord was I of my garden-place of dreams,
Of heaping roses and swan-haunted brakes;
Lord of the doves; lord of the silver streams,
Of gondolas and lilies on the lakes.
And very eighteenth century; both old
And very modern; bold, cosmopolite;
Like Hugo daring, like Verlaine half-told,
And thirsting for illusions infinite.
From childhood it was sorrow that I knew;
My youth-was ever youth my own indeed?-
Its roses still their perfume round me strew,
Their perfume of a melancholy seed-
A rainless colt my instinct galloped free,
My youth bestrode a colt without a rein;
Intoxicate I went, a belted blade with me;
If I fell not-'twas God who did sustain.
Within my garden stood a statue fair,
Of marble seeming, yet of flesh and bone;
A gentle spirit was incarnate there
Of sensitive and sentimental tone.
So timid of the world, it fain would hide
And from its walls of silence issue not,
Save when the Spring released upon its tide
The hour of melody it had begot-
The hour of sunset and of hidden kiss;
The hour of gloaming twilight and retreat;
The hour of madrigal, the hour of bliss,
Of 'I adore thee' and 'Alas' too sweet.
And 'mid the gamut of the flute, perchance,
Would come a ripple of crystal mysteries,
Recalling Pan and his glad Grecian dance
With the intoning of old Latin keys,
With such a sweep, and ardor so intense,
That on the statue suddenly were born
The muscled goat-thighs shaggy and immense,
And o the brow the satyr's pair of horn.
As Gongora's Galatea, so in fine
The fair marquise of Verlaine captured me;
And so unto the passion half divine
Was joined a human sensuality;
All longing and all ardor, the mere sense
And natural vigor; and without a sign
Of stage effect or literature's pretence-
If there is ever a soul sincere-'tis mine.
The ivory tower awakened my desire;
I longed to enclose myself in selfish bliss,
Yet hungered after space, my thirst on fire
For heaven, from out the shades of my abyss.
As with the sponge the salt sea saturates
Below the oozing wave, so was my heart,-
Tender and soft,-bedrenched with bitter fates
That world and flesh and devil here impart.
But through the grace of God my conscience
Elected unto good its better part;
If there were hardness left in any sense
It melted soft beneath the touch of Art.
My intellect was freed from baser thought,
My soul was bathed in the Castalian flood,
My heart a pilgrim went, and so I caught
The harmony from out the sacred wood.
Oh, sacred wood! Oh, rumor, that profound
Stirs from the sacred woodland's heart divine!
Oh, plenteous fountain in whose power is wound
And overcome our destiny malign!
Grove of ideals, where the real halts,
Where flesh is flame alive, and Psyche floats;
The while the satyr makes his old assaults,
Loose Philomel her azure drunken throats.
Fantastic pearl and music amorous
Adown the green and flowering laurel tops;
Hypsipyle stealthily the rose doth buss;
And the faun's mouth the tender stalking crops.
There were the god pursues the flying maid,
Where springs the reed of Pan from out the mire,
The Life eternal hath its furrows laid,
And wakens the All-Father's mystic choir.
The soul that enters there disrobed should go
A-tremble with desire and longing pure
Over the wounding spine and thorn below,
So should it dream, be stirred, and sing secure.
Life, Light and Truth, as in a triple flame
Produce the inner radiance infinite;
Art, pure as Christ, is heartened to exclaim;
I am indeed the Life, the Truth, the Light!
The Life is mystery; the Light is blind;
The Truth beyond our reach both daunts and fades;
The sheer perfection nowhere do we find;
The ideal sleeps, a secret, in the shades.
Therefore to be sincere is to be strong.
Bare as it is, what glimmer hath the star;
The water tells the fountain's soul in song
And voice of crystal flowing out afar.
Such my intent was,-of my spirit pure
To make a star, a fountain music-drawn,
With horror of the thing called literature-
And mad with madness of the gloam and dawn.
Of the blue twilight, such as gives the world
Which the celestial ecstasies inspires,
The haze and minor chord,-let flutes be heard!
Aurora, daughter of the Sun,-sound, lyres!
Let pass the stone if any use the sling;
Let pass, should hands of violence point the dart.
The stone from out the sling is for the waves a thing;
Hate's arrow of the idle wind is part.
Virtue is with the tranquil and the braves;
The fire interior burneth well and high;
Triumphant over rancor and the grave,
Toward Bethlehem-the caravan goes by!